How do you win at these expert races? The tunes I generally use don't work well against them, is there a specific car set up or do I just need to improve my skills somewhat?
I was a bit overwhelmed at first once I finished my first horizon season, and I'm still trying to get the hang of the game. I want to get some of these rewards for the winter season but I can get the above average rewards, not the expert ones which I want more (had enough of emotes and clothes tbh)
Also, how can I make some more credits and influence? I unlocked Colossus and pretty much only race that in my 1982 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3. Trying to afford that senna mclaren and Aston Martin Vulcan FE but I can't get to that 1 million mark for the senna much less the 1.5 million needed for the aston.
To win in PVE expert races for the seasonal stuff, you just have to use one simple trick: once you get ahead of an AI car, it will generally avoid ramming you (from behind). So once you are in first you don't need to be going at 100% speed the rest of the way, just staying in the middle of the lane always will basically prevent anyone from overtaking you. Of course you can rewind if you fuck up and get back in the middle.
The second trick is that their logic doesn't apply to you. So do whatever it takes to get into #1 spot early, AI cars will slow down around corners and you can use that to your advantage by banging into them at full speed at the correct angle so you bounce off them into the turn. It would be HORRIBLE to do this in PVP kind of racing and you are learning super bad habits but it works extremely effectively. Just crash into everyone in the first minute, get to #1, and then its easy sailing from there.
Re: credits, make sure you login every weekend to the forza rewards site and "claim" your reward, the more forza games you play the more the weekly reward. I'm at like 350k/week which adds up crazy fast. You can access the rewards via the mobile or xbox or w10 app as well
https://rewards.forzamotorsport.net/en-US
Other than that just racing, doing the seasonal stuff, etc ends up giving you loads of credits. You can try playing the auction house, buying high demand cars for cheap and immediately reselling them for lots more (and some let you "get" free credits by spending car points and then resell them immediately) but the auction interface is so god awful bad its really not a fun thing to do.
In the early cycle of the forza games there are tons of glitches, like in FH4 there were glitches that allowed you to farm 10m credits/hour via glitched goliath races, so a ton of people are gonna have 200m+ credits so just try listing weird design cars and stuff for 5m+ credits and maybe someone will do a pity buy.